PHOTON STATISTICS OF THE 3-LEVEL ONE-ATOM LASER

We investigate the transient and the steady-state behaviour of the photon statistics of a single-atom laser, consisting of a three-level LAMBDA system, driven by an incoherent external pump field and strongly coupled to a single mode of an optical cavity. For several limiting cases we are able to obtain analytical results. A comparison with standard multi-atom laser theory reveals a surprisingly good agreement down to very small intracavity photon numbers. Under appropriate operating conditions a calculation of the second-order intensity correlation function yields sub-Poissonian statistics as well as strong antibunching induced by the nonlinear dynamics of the atom.